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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
I said in the aftermath of Sept. 11 that I thought our "serious" fiction should get more serious again -- serious in the sense of returning to themes forged by talent and tempered by experience and wisdom.
In "A Winter Haunting," the protagonist, Dale Stewart, struggles with depression on several levels. Though it isn't a large part of the plot, it was very effective. Were you working from personal experience?
While my character Dale Stewart's clinical depression in "A Winter Haunting" is more or less a gimmick to get him into the haunted house near his boyhood town rather than a truly central theme of the book, it is important to the tale in the sense that the story revolves around his damaged perspective on time, reality and himself. In this way, "A Winter Haunting" owes much to Henry James' ghost story "The Jolly Corner." So, just as I went to Romania to research Transylvania for my novel "Children of the Night" and went to Thailand to research my novella "Dying in Bangkok," I had a round-trip ticket to clinical depression before writing "A Winter Haunting."
I've always been a mildly melancholic person and happy about it. The slight humor of melancholy -- the Keatsian pleasure taken at autumnal light and bare branches -- is an aesthetic, not a source of real pain. Nor does depression run in my family.
But in the late autumn of 1997, for some reasons known to no one, least of all to me, events and neurochemicals conspired to drop me through a trapdoor into the kind of clinical depression discussed by William Styron and others.
I won't go into all the details, but suffice to say that for several months I could not read, much less write; I couldn't watch a TV show or movie; I couldn't connect with anything or anyone; I couldn't feel or appreciate sunlight or the out-of-doors. Nature had been my fortress of solitude and solace since I was a little kid ... now it meant nothing. Suicide -- an act I've always despised, fairly or unfairly, as the ultimate act of self-absorption and cowardice -- now seemed nothing more than a logical alternative, like tying one's shoelaces when you notice they've come untied.
Anyway, I chucked myself to the medics soon enough and signed up for the appropriate antidepressants -- "Ten cubic centimeters cure ten gloomy sentiments!" Whatever the bad neural chemistry was, it began to correct itself and within a few months, I began to notice sunlight again and began writing fiction again -- oddly enough, before I could read fiction again. It took about a year before my little mental bark found its balance on the choppy seas again, during which time I wrote all of my novel "Darwin's Blade" -- a knee-slapping comedy about fatal accidents -- several novellas, a film treatment and a screenplay.
I didn't do a good job of describing the experience of depression in "A Winter Haunting" because I didn't even try. Such sadness -- "clinical depression" is an inapt and inadequate phrase to describe such an absolute black hole of despair -- is, like some solitary religious epiphany, almost beyond description. You've either been there or you haven't. All a writer can do is report on stupid behavior and social dysfunction, which is tiresome to everyone, writer included. But as someone who's had the dubious pleasure of experiencing kidney stones over the years, I can say that the pain of real depression is to the discomfort of ordinary sadness as the agony of kidney stones is to our everyday aches and pains -- that is to say, literally incomparable ... and, sooner or later, unendurable. Luckily, there are drugs to make both types of pain stop.
"A Winter Haunting" obviously owes much to Henry James' story "The Jolly Corner." But didn't it start out as a book titled "Going East," about a couple's road trip to the East Coast as their marriage falls apart?
Actually, "Going East" did strangely morph into "A Winter Haunting" over a few years. I've always been fascinated how that works -- how one idea, wildly different from its final iteration, twists and turns on its slouchy way toward Bethlehem to be born.
"Going East" was to be a mainstream novel about a man and woman in their early 50s, recently divorced, who end up driving from California to Washington, D.C., together (their youngest child is leaving Georgetown University for a semester abroad and they want to say goodbye to him) -- the drive accidentally replicating a premarriage trip they took from Berkeley to a Washington antiwar moratorium there in the fall of 1969, more than three decades earlier. I had lots I wanted to say about differing perspectives of our aging Boomer generation -- about love and energy and the loss of each, about how nasty idealism can be and how pleasant a little materialism can be, about roadside diners and fast food drive-throughs, about felt-tip pens and the Internet, about men and women before and after kids.
But in the meantime, it somehow turned into "A Winter Haunting," in which a man who's lost his wife and family through a series of bad decisions -- read middle-aged fling -- ends up going back to his old hometown in the Midwest and spends the winter in a haunted house.
Go figure.
My first mental draft of "A Winter Haunting" contained many of the themes I'd wanted to deal with in "Going East" -- a parallax view of life across the past four decades, the profound changes in our American landscape as our cities and lives have become, more and more, a "geography of nowhere," due to homogenization and lack of imagination, and so forth -- but eventually all that was tossed out of "A Winter Haunting" except for a few sentences of the main character's musings, and I focused on the story of the man lost in himself in that house haunted by his own memories and failures. In that sense, I made the deliberate decision to teleport from Tom Wolfe's universe to Henry James'. I'm happy in both.
